American
Psycho
Rated
R
Now showing
Director Mary
Harron cut several seconds from a threesome sequence in
order to get American Psycho an R rating. It was
originally NC-17.
You can sign
up to receive e-mail from the film's cracked protagonist,
Patrick Bateman, at www.americanpsycho.com.
Once upon a time in the 1980s, a group of men existed who
were self-absorbed, money-grubbing assholes. They worked
on Wall Street, sported immaculate hair, ate at the trendiest
restaurants, wore Valentino suits and were really concerned
with the aesthetic of their business cards. They preferred
beautiful, thin, blonde women who didn't talk too much.
They snorted coke in nightclubs, listened to banal music
and voted for Ronald Reagan. To some, these men were the
ultimate representation of making it. To others they were
the soulless depravity of Reaganomics--sociopaths in Armani.
Yeah, no shit. And people who live in trailer parks are
fat, white-trash beer drinkers who get into a lot of fights.
Sweeping generalizations can be funny, but is there no
end to such easy, tired lampoonery? The answer is, of course
not, as proven in the ostensibly arty film American Psycho,
director Mary Harron's entertaining yet uncompelling dissection
of late-'80s greed and narcissism. Though often funny and
clever, the movie is such an overwrought analysis of the
culture of excess that it is too painfully obvious to be
the great satire it wants to be. It's simply a very well-acted
comedy that looks good.
Adapted from Bret Easton Ellis' unfairly maligned novel,
the movie concerns the sociopathic tendencies of 27-year-old
Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), an amoral Wall Street
drone who admits to feeling nothing human inside of him.
His life is a vacuum of vanity and materialism. He lives
in an immaculate, almost entirely white apartment on Manhattan's
Upper West Side, where he engages in a daily routine of
ab-crunching, skin exfoliation, porn-watching and basic
self-obsession. For pleasure (if you can call it that),
he listens to bad '80s music, dates debutantes, attends
nightclubs, snorts coke, screws prostitutes and, presumably,
kills people. A blank slate who is not satisfied with his
attempts to fill himself out with the best restaurants,
women and furnishings, he struggles to find some kind of
human breakthrough through murder. Since greed and contempt
are all he feels, why not? It's fun to kill people. Or is
it?
Using the cold-blooded mind of a serial killer as the ultimate
metaphor for the greedy, soul-depleting Bonfire of the
Vanities '80s, Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol) makes
a movie that spells out its intentions at every turn. The
yuppies here are all despicable, which would be fine
if their parade of egocentricity were not so redundant.
Pretty women are smacked up on lithium and fall asleep at
fancy restaurants, prostitutes understand they are only
commodities, and businessmen are caught up in the narcissistic
fount of their business cards. In one briefly funny scene,
a circle of men show off their business cards at work with
such obvious metaphorical machismo that you can almost hear
their dicks plunking on the conference table.
Bateman's obsession with music is bizarre and amusing,
and his deadpan soliloquies on current pop music remain
chilling and hilarious throughout the film. For example,
he discusses Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All" (as
an anthem of self-esteem, the perfect song for the narcissistic
Bateman) before butchering a snobby debutante mid-copulation.
These music scenes--and indeed the entire tone of the film--should
be credited less to Harron than to Ellis, who put them in
his book back in 1991, a more daring and fresh time to poke
fun at such things.
Though many see Harron's take on Ellis' hated book as a
better and more incisive indictment of the '80s than the
source material was, they are in many ways wrong. Ellis
has always claimed that his book's real subject was the
'80s and that Bateman, as an over-the-top monster, was its
representation. The public response to Ellis' book was a
landmark of '90s hysterical political correctness. Everyone
jumped on the Ellis-bashing bandwagon--mostly without reading
the book--as if killing American Psycho would eradicate
the just-lapsed decade, would erase the thirst for money
and objectification of humanity that it represented.
But that was then, this is now, and what was so vivid and
disgusting and daring for its time is just not very intriguing
on screen. Those who thought Ellis' work a form of pornographic
misogyny will probably be pleased that a woman directed
the film version and made it less bloody, more ambiguous
and more "symbolic"--but she also made it all just so easy.
Harron's movie evokes Robert Palmer's video for "Addicted
to Love" (a song Bateman loves), in which legions of beautiful,
zombie-like women dance in jerky, disturbing motions of
anorexic sexiness--except the video was actually more chilling.
Unless something more intelligent comes along, we don't
need American Psycho to satirize the '80s: The decade
still satirizes itself.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 19,
2000
|
